Selling Your Home? The Higher You Price It, The Longer It’ll Take.

No matter how hard you try, you’re never going to sell a property if it’s overpriced. Obviously, you’ve got to advertise – and advertise properly. That means you’ve got to use the major online property portals because these days, there is no alternative. Local press? That’s more for jobs (if any) these days, and jumble sales. Oh, and the occasional visiting ‘massage’ service. Estate agent office windows? Worth a glance, perhaps, but not much more. Let’s face it – if you’re not on Rightmove, Zoopla, FindaProperty and Prime Location that sale just isn’t going to happen. But there’s no guarantee you’ll find a buyer there, though.

In a market like today’s, with lenders not prepared to lend, potential buyers staying put instead of moving and potential sellers sitting it out, you’ve got to be realistic about the value of your property. Any number of shiny-suited estate agents will give you any number of different valuations (usually higher than what’s absolutely realistic), so you’ve got to take a long, hard look at what you’re selling and be brutally honest about the price you’re asking. It’s not just you who’d be getting an inflated valuation – WHICH? Magazine has just given High Street estate agents up and down the country grief for inflating property values, and they should know. It’s a ploy to get your business (for ‘business’ read ‘money’) or a tactic to avoid having to tell you you’ve lost money on your home. Because nobody wants to hear that, do they?

There are currently 1.5 million properties for sale on Rightmove and transaction levels are at an all time low. And that’s not because there aren’t any buyers or any mortgages. Buyers are canny and well informed. They know the local market and have studied it. They’ll look at the Land Registry and the many online resources available in order to swot up on a property’s value. If yours is one of the more expensive of its type in the area it simply won’t get any attention at all in comparison to the more accurately priced competition. When searching online for a property, do you view the most expensive one in the list? Or the cheapest?

So if you’re trying to sell and getting nowhere fast, here are the only two reasons that sale isn’t happening. Reason number one would be a bad estate agency, who’s not spreading the word about your home as far as that word should be spread – either because it won’t spread that word that far … or because it can’t. Reason number two would be the asking price. If it’s too high, you don’t stand a chance of selling. So if your agent isn’t doing everything possible to get your house sold, by all means ditch him. But if he is, by all means keep him on … and consider adjusting your asking price.

Because the best and most expensive advertising will still not convince people to pay above market value. Indeed projecting a picture of your house on to David Beckham’s butt cheeks will not sell it if overpriced compared to others.

Home buyers don’t bother to walk into estate agency offices now. 90% of them search for property on the internet. eMoov cover the whole of the UK but save money by not having hundreds of properties which you otherwise end up paying for in high estate agents fees. eMoov are online estate agents. They are a step up from private house sales and ten times cheaper than the High Street. Why pay more?

Technorati Tags: Finance